Tuesday, April 19, 2016

I was walking towards a building this morning trying to think of good way to describe it in writing but I drew a blank. However, while I was sitting on a wooden bench after having a banana for lunch a clear description of the building flashed into my mind.

This evening, while I was looking for a reference that Nassim Taleb made about Balzac's Lost Illusions, I stumbled upon this excerpt that I had highlighted in The Black Swan backin 2007.Furthermore, we think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For instance, if you study every day, you expect to learn something in proportion to your studies. If you feel that you are not going anywhere, your emotions will cause you to become demoralized. But modern reality rarely gives us the privilege of a satisfying, linear, positive progression: you may think about a problem for a year and learn nothing; then, unless you are disheartened by the emptiness of the results and give up, something will come to you in a flash.